SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
");background-position:center;background-size:19px 19px;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-color:var(--button-bg-color);padding:0;width:var(--form-elem-height);height:var(--form-elem-height);font-size:0;}:is(.js-newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter_bar.newsletter-wrapper) .widget__body:has(.response:not(:empty)) :is(.widget__headline, .widget__subheadline, #mc_embed_signup .mc-field-group, #mc_embed_signup input[type="submit"]){display:none;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) #mce-responses:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-row:1 / -1;grid-column:1 / -1;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget__body > .snark-line:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-column:1 / -1;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) :is(.newsletter-campaign:has(.response:not(:empty)), .newsletter-and-social:has(.response:not(:empty))){width:100%;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;justify-content:center;align-items:center;gap:8px 20px;margin:0 auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .text-element{display:flex;color:var(--shares-color);margin:0 !important;font-weight:400 !important;font-size:16px !important;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .whitebar_social{display:flex;gap:12px;width:auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col a{margin:0;background-color:#0000;padding:0;width:32px;height:32px;}.newsletter-wrapper .social_icon:after{display:none;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget article:before, .newsletter-wrapper .widget article:after{display:none;}#sFollow_Block_0_0_1_0_0_0_1{margin:0;}.donation_banner{position:relative;background:#000;}.donation_banner .posts-custom *, .donation_banner .posts-custom :after, .donation_banner .posts-custom :before{margin:0;}.donation_banner .posts-custom .widget{position:absolute;inset:0;}.donation_banner__wrapper{position:relative;z-index:2;pointer-events:none;}.donation_banner .donate_btn{position:relative;z-index:2;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_0{color:#fff;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_1{font-weight:normal;}.sticky-sidebar{margin:auto;}@media (min-width: 1024px){.main:has(.sticky-sidebar){overflow:visible;}}@media (min-width: 1024px){.row:has(.sticky-sidebar){display:flex;overflow:visible;}}@media (min-width: 1024px){.sticky-sidebar{position:-webkit-sticky;position:sticky;top:100px;transition:top .3s ease-in-out, position .3s ease-in-out;}}.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper.sidebar{background:linear-gradient(91deg, #005dc7 28%, #1d63b2 65%, #0353ae 85%);}
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
A landmark case could force taxpayers to fund religious charter schools.
On April 30, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could fundamentally reshape public education: Oklahoma’s controversial approval of the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School. The case forces a critical question to the forefront—should taxpayers be compelled to finance religious schools while having no authority to regulate them?
The court’s decision could continue a pattern of rulings that have chipped away at the traditional separation between church and state, transforming the landscape of public education and public funding. If the justices side with St. Isidore, the ruling could mark a turning point in American schooling—one that may erode public accountability, alter funding priorities, and blur the constitutional boundaries that have long defined the relationship between religion and government.
This case builds on a series of decisions from the Roberts Court that have steadily eroded the wall between church and state. In Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, the court allowed public funds to be used for secular purposes by religious institutions. Espinozav. Montana Department of Revenue expanded this principle, ruling that states cannot exclude religious schools from publicly funded programs. And in Carson v. Makin, the court went further, mandating that state voucher programs include religious schools, arguing that exclusion constitutes discrimination against religion.
As the justices deliberate, they would do well to consider not just the legal arguments, but also the practical and moral consequences of their decision.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Carson, stated, “[i]n particular, we have repeatedly held that a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” On its face, this reasoning frames the issue as one of fairness—ensuring religious entities are not treated unequally. But the deeper implications of this logic are far more radical.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, this interpretation fundamentally redefines the Free Exercise Clause, equating a government’s refusal to fund religious institutions with unconstitutional religious discrimination. Justice Stephen Breyer took this concern a step further, pointing to the court’s own precedent to highlight the dangerous trajectory of its rulings:
We have previously found, as the majority points out, that “a neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend the Establishment Clause.” We have thus concluded that a State may, consistent with the Establishment Clause, provide funding to religious schools through a general public funding program if the “government aid… reach[es] religious institutions only by way of the deliberate choices of… individual [aid] recipients.”
Breyer then underscored the significance of this distinction:
But the key word is “may.” We have never previously held what the court holds today, namely, that a State must (not may) use state funds to pay for religious education as part of a tuition program designed to ensure the provision of free statewide public school education.
Finally, he distilled the implications into a warning: “What happens once ‘may’ becomes ‘must’?”
That shift—from allowance to obligation—could force states not only to permit religious education in publicly funded programs, but to actively finance it, eroding any semblance of neutrality between public and religious schooling. This transformation threatens to unravel the Establishment Clause’s core protection: that government does not privilege or compel religious exercise.
Now, the Oklahoma case brings Breyer’s warning into sharp focus. The petitioners are asking the court to declare that charter schools are not state actors—meaning they would be free from public accountability and regulations, including those related to discrimination or special education. At the same time, they argue that public funds must be made available to religious charters. The implications of such a ruling could reverberate across the country, reshaping education in profound and troubling ways.
If the Court sides with St. Isidore, the ripple effects could be seismic, triggering a wave of religious charter school applications and fundamentally altering the landscape of public education. Here’s how:
Religious institutions, particularly those struggling to sustain traditional parochial schools, would have a financial lifeline. Charter subsidies, which often surpass voucher amounts, would incentivize religious organizations to enter the charter school market. For years, leaders in some religious communities have sought public funding to buoy their schools, and a decision in favor of St. Isidore could provide the legal green light. The result? A proliferation of religious charters, funded by taxpayers but largely free from public oversight.
The implications for students with disabilities are especially concerning. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act’s implementing regulations, a student with disabilities who is “placed in or referred to a private school or facility by a public agency…[h]as all of the rights of a child with a disability who is served by a public agency.” Yet, a ruling in favor of St. Isidore risks undermining these guarantees by creating a loophole for private religious charters to skirt IDEA’s requirements.
This concern is not just theoretical. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the hybrid nature of charter schools already complicates questions of accountability and state action, particularly when it comes to safeguarding student rights. Allowing religious charters to operate free from IDEA’s obligations would further erode the fragile legal protections students with disabilities rely on—protections that are already too often disregarded in practice.
The pandemic underscored the challenges of balancing public health mandates with constitutional protections for religious freedom. In 2020, a federal judge in Kentucky struck down the state’s attempt to close religious schools during a Covid-19 spike, even as public and secular private schools complied. Extending public funding to religious charters could further erode the state’s ability to enforce neutral regulations, from health measures to curriculum standards. Such decisions privilege religious institutions over secular ones, creating a patchwork of inconsistent rules that could undermine public safety and equity.
Can these challenges be mitigated? Some experts argue for stricter regulations to preserve the public nature of charter schools. Bruce Baker, a professor of education finance, suggests limiting charter authorization to government agencies and requiring boards and employees to be public officials. Such reforms could ensure that charters remain accountable to taxpayers and subject to the same constitutional constraints as public schools.
Other scholars, like Preston Green and Suzanne Eckes, propose requiring religious charters to forgo certain exemptions if they wish to receive public funding. Specifically, they recommend restructuring charter school boards as government-created and controlled entities to ensure they are unequivocally recognized as state actors subject to constitutional obligations. For example, this would require religious charters to comply fully with anti-discrimination laws and other public mandates, maintaining the balance between religious freedom and public accountability.
Even with these potential safeguards, the broader implications are sobering. If the court rules in favor of religious charters, states will face difficult choices: increase taxes to fund an expanding universe of religious and secular schools, divert money away from public schools, or create new bureaucracies to regulate religious institutions. Taxpayers could find themselves funding schools tied to a bewildering array of faiths, from mainstream denominations to fringe sects.
As the justices deliberate, they would do well to consider not just the legal arguments, but also the practical and moral consequences of their decision. What happens to a society when its public institutions are splintered along religious lines? And what happens to the students and families who depend on those institutions for equity, opportunity, and inclusion?
The answers to these questions will shape the future of American education—and the values we choose to uphold.
"We've got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools, and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy," said one co-author.
"The evidence is clear that fossil fuels—and the fossil fuel industry and its enablers—are driving a multitude of interlinked crises that jeopardize the breadth and stability of life on Earth."
That's the first line of the abstract for an article published Monday by top scientists who reviewed "the vast scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are the root cause of the climate crisis, harm public health, worsen environmental injustice, accelerate biodiversity extinction, and fuel the petrochemical pollution crisis."
The new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change highlights the diverse impacts of "every stage of the fossil fuel life cycle" and stresses that the "industry has obscured and concealed this evidence through a decadeslong, multibillion-dollar disinformation campaign aimed at blocking action to phase out" its deadly products.
"The fossil fuel industry has spent decades misleading us about the harms of their products and working to prevent meaningful climate action," said co-author Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, in a statement. "Perversely, our governments continue to give out hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to this damaging industry. It is past time that stops."
"The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure."
While the researchers focused on the United States, "as the world's largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises," their review—including proposed "science-and-justice-based solutions" for an economywide effort to "forge a path forward to sustaining life on Earth"—applies to the whole world, which is quickly heating up due to emissions from coal, gas, and oil.
The article features sections on the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, public health harms, environmental injustice, biodiversity loss and extinction, petrochemical pollution, and industry disinformation. Each section lays out the "problem" and "solutions."
The climate emergency section includes details such as "the production and combustion of oil, gas, and coal are responsible for nearly 90% of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and approximately 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions," and "failures in political will to implement necessary climate action have made the 1.5°C benchmark nearly impossible to achieve without overshoot," referring to a primary goal of the 2015 Paris agreement.
Although the current U.S. administration has demonstrated its alliance to the fossil fuel industry—including with President Donald Trump's recent energy emergency declaration—the scientists still emphasized what's possible in the country.
"In the USA, powerful policy levers are available to governments and civil society at the local, state, national, and international levels to phase out fossil fuels and transition to a clean, renewable energy economy," they wrote. "These levers include regulation (e.g. applying and enforcing existing laws), legislation (e.g. polluters pay laws, fossil fuel subsidy reform, land use laws limiting drilling), and litigation (e.g. holding fossil fuel companies accountable, defending existing law)."
They also warned that "last-ditch efforts to prolong the fossil fuel industry are proliferating. These include counterproductive false solutions, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would perpetuate fossil fuel use while capturing only some of the resulting emissions, and hydrogen made from fossil fuels."
The public health section notes that "air pollution from fossil fuel combustion accounts for 8.7 million (equaling 1 in 5) premature deaths per year worldwide and 350,000 premature deaths per year in the USA. In a single year, air pollution from oil and gas production in the USA resulted in 410,000 asthma exacerbations, 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, and 7,500 premature deaths in 2016."
Co-author David J.X. González, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, said Monday that "we've got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy."
"Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past."
The paper points out that "climate change is increasing incidence of physical and mental health impacts and mortality through multiple pathways: worsening extreme events including heatwaves, severe storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires; shifting ranges of disease vectors; threats to food security; and displacement and forced migration, which restrict access to healthcare and other basic services."
"These harms, though broadly felt, also disproportionately impact marginalized communities which are already disproportionately burdened by other socioenvironmental hazards, as well as susceptible populations including young children, people with certain disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, pregnant people, people with chronic diseases, and older adults," the publication continues.
University of Montana associate professor of environmental studies Robin Saha, another co-author, said that "decades of discriminatory policies, such as redlining, have concentrated fossil fuel development in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities, resulting in devastating consequences."
"For far too long, these fenceline communities have been treated as sacrifice zones by greedy, callous industries," Saha added. "The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure."
The paper's other co-authors are Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University, Boston University's Jonathan J. Buonocore and Mary D. Willis, Trisia Farrelly of the Cawthron Institute, William Ripple of Oregon State University, and the Center for Biological Diversity's Nathan Donley, John Fleming, and Shaye Wolf.
"The science can't be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us," declared Wolf, the paper's lead author and the center's climate science director. "Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past. Clean, renewable energy is here, it's affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centerpiece of our economy."
The scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.
When I was an undergraduate, I landed a paid internship that set me on a trajectory to a career in science policy—though of course I didn’t know it at the time. Like many college students, I had no idea what I wanted to do for work.
But my summer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development in North Carolina opened my eyes. The smart, thoughtful federal scientists I worked with were using their scientific expertise to serve the public good. It was a revelation for a student who wanted to choose a path that positively impacted the world.
Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.
Over the summer, I learned from a team of hard-working people about everything from pesticide research to health effects of air pollution to detecting water quality contamination. In my mentors, I saw their pride in being federal scientists, part of a robust scientific enterprise, and in advancing the public health and environmental mission of the EPA. I observed the tremendous impact they had improving environmental conditions for the nation, all because they chose to devote their expertise to federal service.
And after that experience, and throughout the years of my career at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and in government, I continued to witness firsthand the incredible impact of the EPA Office of Research and Development in Washington, D.C., and across the country.
The Research and Development Office is the scientific research arm of the EPA. Its scientists research and communicate the science that serves as the foundation for public health protections for the nation. The office’s work informs decisions on issues that affect our health: from groundbreaking work on the cumulative impacts of pollution on our bodies, to advancing detection and prevention of water and soil pollution, to air quality monitoring and modeling advances, and the integration of climate change and its effects across disciplines.
Despite a long record of world-class research and demonstrated success in its mission, the Trump administration has indicated plans to close the Research and Development Office. But the scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.
Earlier this spring, UCS organized and delivered a sign-on letter from 54 scientific societies representing more than 100,000 scientists, demanding that Congress protect and restore life-saving and essential scientific research that benefits families and communities in the U.S.—including the research done by the Research and Development Office.
The threats to this specific office join a growing list of attacks on federal research activities at large. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which conducts medical research and funds such projects at other institutions, measures implemented by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) are hindering federal scientists’ ability to do their jobs within the agency. Cuts to NIH funding for more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions across the country have resulted in canceled clinical trials and studies on diseases, job losses for promising young researchers, and an abrupt end to any research that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s incoherent preferences.
How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution.
Cuts to federal funding of academic research are threatening to upend the U.S. university research enterprise and set back the infrastructure and people supporting U.S.-produced science and research by decades. Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.
Shutting down the research operations of the federal government means closing the door on bright-eyed students like me and other early career researchers, limiting their options in this country (and in many cases, driving them to work abroad). It means missed opportunities to bring young talented scientists into government, creating a brain drain with lasting effects. Shutting down research means chipping away at the scaffolding that upholds federal policy decisions across issue areas, and threatening our ability to make evidence-based policy choices as a nation. And that’s why we cannot allow this to happen.
As an intern with the EPA Research and Development Office, my project that summer was to analyze air pollution measurements collected in Detroit neighborhoods. The study was intended to help us better understand people’s exposure to air pollution—near roads, in their homes, in the central city, and everywhere in between. How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution. The sense of wonder I experienced in that lab sparked a personal mission to apply science to help people that has carried me throughout my career.
I think of the wealth of science that’s been produced, the many evidence-based environmental policy decisions made, and the lives saved from air pollution standards in the years since that summer. We’ve come a long way since I was an ambitious young researcher on that tree-covered campus. We can’t give up now. Join us in fighting against these attacks with our Save Science, Save Lives campaign.